Category: Blogs
thoughtfully written
This started out in 2016/17 as a search to build a mid-term portfolio in a structured way such that I have key asset classes like stocks, bonds & REITs which are geographically not concentrated, set up as a basket which I can keep buying on a monthly/quarterly/yearly basis. Since I had been doing this in the Indian market using smallcase and direct mutual-funds I wanted to replicate it in US markets which I found more promising given its maturity. NYSE and NASDAQ has 6x more monthly trading volumes as compared to NSE and BSE and has a strict regulatory framework which ensures compliant financial reporting which is the basis for fundamental analysis. More on this in future blog posts.
I want to share this piece of information which has helped me put a lot of technical aspects in context when I started out to build estackk. I believe this will help the entrepreneur community in building their internet-business. Bear in mind that technology is only 50% of the SaaS business, rest being sales, GTM, marketing, pricing, service-UI-UX and a ton of other things.
This amazing quote from Confucius is something I came across couple of years back and made an impact on my way of living.
Having worked with Japanese counterparts and talking to them over some of our Izakaya outings, I was also exposed to a concept called ikigai (pronounced Ick-ee-guy).
ikigai is seen as the convergence of four primary elements:
- What you love (your passion)
- What the world needs (your mission)
- What you are good at (your vocation)
- What you can get paid for (your profession)
Hector Garcia, the co-author of Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life describes it as “Your ikigai is at the intersection of what you are good at and what you love doing,”. He writes, “Just as humans have lusted after objects and money since the dawn of time, other humans have felt dissatisfaction at the relentless pursuit of money and fame and have instead focused on something bigger than their own material wealth. This has over the years been described using many different words and practices, but always hearkening back to the central core of meaningfulness in life.”
Somehow my mind wanted to connect the Confucius quote to ikigai. The timing of both the events and the phase of my life was such that it was inevitable for me to connect them, maybe this was my way to experience a mid-life crisis.
Discovering your own ikigai is said to bring fulfillment, happiness and make you live longer. Not that I want to live longer, but wanted to consciously be at peace as long as I live.
Hoping each one of us are fortunate and conscious enough to discover the passion, mission, vocation and profession earlier in life to maximize the joy of experiencing it…
By now you must have figured that I have set up automation such that my tweets are auto-published as a post on my blog with a prefix of [Microblog]. This just enables me to have a single point reference to all my readings and information. In future, I will also share some of the podcasts which I feel have tremendously helped me in the last couple of years. I continue to re-listen to some of them till date.